POMONA – Some students may have been a little less than enthusiastic about going back to school Monday after a long winter break but not those at Western University of Health Sciences.

More than 1,000 of the university’s students were excited to get back to campus and start using facilities such as the new classrooms, state-of-the-art training equipment and small study rooms found in the Health Education Center, which opened Monday morning.

The building becomes the new home for the university’s College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific and the new colleges of dentistry, optometry and podiatric medicine.

Students were impressed with the look of the new building.

“It’s just beautiful,” said Katie Dickey a resident of Hollywood and a second-year student in the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific.

“We have little study rooms, and I can’t wait to use them.”

The rooms are equipped with the necessary equipment that allow students take information on their laptops and project it on television screens so they can share it with rest of the people they’re studying with, Dickey said.

The four-story, 180,000-square-foot building has more than 50 of the small group study rooms.

In addition to those, the building has six 125-seat lecture halls and two 356-seat auditoriums.

Students weren’t the only ones happy to see the new building open. Faculty members were also exploring the new facilities.

Even though the new auditoriums are large, “it’s as if you’re in a theater where you can reach the audience,” said Dr. Andrew Pumerantz, chairman of the department of internal medicine within the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific and chief of the division of infectious diseases. “It really doesn’t even feel that large.”

Some of the large lecture halls in the Health Professions Center from which the four programs moved were not always conducive to teaching and learning because structural elements such a pillars and posts act as barriers between students and professors, Pumerantz said.

The older Health Professions Center won’t be going out of service. The extra space in the old building will allow give room for the College of Pharmacy to spread out, said Jeff Keating, university spokesman.

The new building is part of a $100 million expansion on the east end of the campus that includes the construction of the Banfield Veterinary Clinical Center, which opened its doors in August 2008, a 600-space parking structure and a patient care center for which preparations and licensing procedures are still in the works.

The new building also has several simulation rooms designed to give dental and optometry students the opportunity to use the knowledge from books and lectures and apply it using models.

Monday dental students began familiarizing themselves with the new A-dec dental simulators.

The 80-plus simulators are equipped with the equipment dentists have in their practices and mannequins with a mouth full of teeth.

In addition, the stations are equipped with small television monitors where the students can access computerized dental records or review digital dental images, said Dean James Koelbl, head of the university’s College of Dental Medicine.

That same monitor will also allow faculty members, with the help of a camera, to demonstrate a procedure from his own simulation station and give every student a close up look at what is taking place, he said.

With such equipment “students learn to do dentistry in an environment as close to doing so with a live patient,” Koelbl said.

Dental programs have used simulation as part of training students in the past but rarely has the equipment been available to create such realistic conditions, he said.

All of this equipment is designed to give students as much hands-on experience as possible and getting them ready to work with real patients and in an effective manner, Koelbl said.

On hand to help students become familiar with the equipment was Brian Kline, school and government account manager for Oregon-based A-dec Inc., manufacturers of the dental simulators.

These simulators are the most recent version of the equipment, and Western University is the first to get them and put them into use, he said.

The simulators are equipped with the new technology dentists are using such as electric powered drills instead of the older pneumatic versions, Kline said.

Mike Saade, a resident of Brea, was among the first-year dental students ready to begin working with the simulators Monday.

During the first semester students traveled to a temporary classroom at Pomona Unified School District’s Village at Indian Hill where they were able to do limited simulation work, he said.

With the arrival of the state-of-the-art dental simulators students will be able practice much more of what they’ve learned, Saade said.

Last semester students had about five hours a week of simulation time, he said.

“Now (it will be) close to 20 hours a week. It’s going to be a big difference,” Saade said.

Saade said he was looking forward to returning to school Monday in part because he knew there would a new building with new resources available to him and his classmates.

These are resources students knew would be coming from the time they interviewed as part of the process of seeking a seat in the program, he said.

Last semester the dental school experience still “wasn’t real,” Saade said.

With the opening of the new building and the arrival of the new equipment, “it hits you. Now it feels real,” he said.

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